Religious Accommodation vs. Women’s Equality Rights at a Canadian University

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For the last couple of weeks (early January 2014) the Toronto press has been abuzz with a story emanating from York University. In brief, it is the following.

A male student was taking an on-line course from Prof. Paul Grayson in York’s Department of Sociology.  Although the course was on-line, Prof. Grayson required his students to visit the campus once to take part in a group activity with other students. The male student asked to be excused from this requirement as his religion prohibited his interaction with unrelated women. We don’t know the student’s religion, and Grayson refused to speculate, but he said he did consult with both Jewish and Muslim religious leaders. He then declined the student’s request.

York University Keele Campus- Wiki Commons

Meantime, however, Grayson’s Dean and other senior administrators instructed him to grant the request. One reason for this was that he had excused at least one other student who lived outside Canada from the requirement to be present on campus.  The other reason was that, under the doctrine of “reasonable accommodation,” administrators’ are supposed to decide whether a religious accommodation would harm anyone else’s human rights. The administrators decided—somewhat reluctantly, it seems—that excusing the student from interacting with female co-students would not harm any woman students’ rights.

One question here is whether the harm would be real or merely symbolic. Would the female students be harmed, perhaps, by being deprived of the male student’s brilliant insights? If there was no such harm, did the fact that he did not wish to interact with women somehow constitute a psychological or symbolic harm, suggesting that they were unworthy of his attention, or unclean, or somehow sexual temptresses.

Professor Grayson argued that the York administrators would have been unlikely to assent to the student’s request if he has said his religion prohibited him from interacting with black or gay people.  I think he’s right about blacks: the administrators could not permit racial discrimination, even if it had been hidden (Grayson did not have to tell other students about the request). About gay people, I am not so sure. Religious prejudices against homosexuals are rooted in some of the same prejudices held against women. Women in their bodily functions, especially menstruation, are seen by some religions as dirty and shameful. In this view, gays’ sexual activities also render them dirty and shameful.

Nevertheless, I can’t imagine any York administrators instructing Grayson to grant a student’s request not to interact with gays. So why grant it with regard to women? I think the answer is the long history of separation of women and men in some religions, especially some variants of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. This separation is bound up with traditional ideas of modesty and the separation of the sexes for their own good.  So it still doesn’t seem as wrong to say that your religion doesn’t permit you to interact with strange women, as to say your religion doesn’t permit you to interact with blacks or gays.

In preparation for writing this blog I reread an article I published (with Laura Reidel) in 2007, “Human Security and Multiculturalism in Canada” (published in Ineke Boerefijn and Jenny Goldschmidt, eds, Human Rights in the Polder, Oxford, Intersentia).  In that article I discussed a number of debates going on in Canada at the time; about prayer space for Muslims in Quebec universities, gay marriage, the use of shari’a-based arbitration in Ontario, and censorship of cartoons appearing to denigrate Islam.  I concluded the following:

“[T]he right to practice a minority religion should [not] be permitted to undermine the human rights of citizens of liberal democracies. The state should accede to demands for accommodation by religious minorities only when such accommodation is not likely to undermine the human rights of any citizens, whether inside or outside the religious minority…[A]ll citizens are at risk if policies to accommodate the demands of any religious minority undermine the liberal democratic human rights regime.” (p. 35)

On this basis I supported prayer space for Muslim (and all other religious) students (even though space is always in short supply at Canadian universities). But I opposed shari’a based arbitration (as well as arbitration under Jewish law) on the grounds that it can undermine women’s and children’s rights. I supported gay marriage. I opposed banning of cartoons, on the grounds that freedom of speech is more important than protecting believers from offense.

Using the principle that accommodation must not undermine other people’s human rights, I think Professor Grayson did the right thing. Even if there was no immediate material damage to the women in his class, the principle that a man does not have to interact with women in an educational or work setting is denigrating to them. It implies that they are less than fully human, not worthy of the same respect as men.

Of course the York University case gives ammunition to proponents of the Quebec Charter of Values, about which I wrote on September 11, 2013: you can find that blog here  http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013_09_01_archive.html . The proposed Charter would ban public servants from wearing religious apparel at work. I maintain my view on the Quebec Charter. I see no reason to ban religious apparel from the public sector, although I would prohibit proselytization by public servants at their workplace, whether in Quebec or elsewhere. Banning religious apparel sends an extremely negative message to members of minority religious groups, while permitting it does not undermine anyone else’s human rights.

From the Shadows of the Soviets

From the Shadows of the Soviets

(Note: I have decided to open up my blog site to the occasional guest blog. The blog below is by my current research assistant, David Clement, candidate for a Master’s degree in political science at Wilfrid Laurier University)

Imagine yourself on an extended vacation as a child, enjoying a new country, its food, its people and its pleasures, all the while knowing that at some point in the near future you’ll be heading back to your beloved hometown. Now imagine, at the age of 16, you are told that your extended vacation is now permanent because everything your family once had back home is gone, either stolen or destroyed. This is how my family came to Canada.

Like most Canadians, I am from an immigrant family. The mosaic that is my familial background includes the Isle of Man and India (on my father’s side) and the United States and Bulgaria (on my mother’s). What makes my Bulgarian heritage so intriguing is the circumstances that caused their migration to the country I have called home for my entire life. My grandmother came from a prosperous business family from Bansko, Bulgaria. My great grandparents, Pauline and Boris Todoroff, were eclectic entrepreneurs in that small ski village nestled at the foot of the Pirin Mountains. They successfully owned and operated a bakery, liquor store and inn at the center of Bansko. Because of their success as entrepreneurs, they were able to afford some luxuries that others could not, most importantly the ability to travel. My great-grandfather, otherwise known as Dadu, decided in the summer of 1938 that his family should take an extended vacation in Canada, for the experience, and to strategically avoid the turmoil that was erupting throughout Europe. What was not known is that their hometown would never be the same, and that they would never return.

A picture of central Bansko- Wiki Commons

In the fall of 1944 Soviet troops invaded Bulgaria beginning the era of Soviet influence in the country. As a result of the invasion, and political upheaval, my family lost everything. Their businesses were seized by the Russians, and their land was partially destroyed. Upon news of the terrible loss, the Todoroff family decided to make London Ontario their permanent home, and it would remain so until my grandmother was well into her 30’s. My family took its entrepreneurial spirit to Dundas Street in London where they owned and operated a shoe repair shop, selling shoes and hats. They represented, both literally and symbolically, the perseverance of a family after losing almost everything. What my Bulgarian family’s story demonstrates first is the importance of migration for Canada. The Todoroff family came to Canada unexpectedly, with few language skills and very little to their name, but contributed to the growth of London Ontario for decades. It highlights that the movement of migrants into Canada not only provide migrant families a place to rebuild, but a new community to which they contribute and of which they become a part of.

The second lesson learnt from my family’s turbulent arrival is the importance of property. The right to property is an essential human right. The arbitrary seizure of property by government authorities strips families of their ability to provide for themselves and their communities. It denies them access to the most basic means of wealth creation and sustenance. From this difficult experience, a new Canadian family emerged. This new Canadian family embraced their new home, were able to own property, and were able to make their own lives better, as well as the lives of those around them.

Eritrean Refugees: Victims of Human Trafficking

Eritrean Refugees: Victims of Human Trafficking

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In early December 2013 I read a report in the Globe and Mail by Geoffrey York (“A Desperate and deadly tide of migration,” p. A17, December 4, 2013) about the human trafficking of Eritreans in the Sinai Peninsula area of Egypt, next to Israel. York in turn was reporting on a document submitted to the European parliament by three researchers, an Eritrean human rights activist called Meron Estefanos, and Professor Mirjan van Risen and Dr. Connie Rijken from Tilburg University in the Netherlands.  The report is called “The Human Trafficking Cycle: Sinai and Beyond” and can be found here http://www.eepa.be/wcm/dmdocuments/Small_HumanTrafficking-Sinai2-web-3.pdf.

These unfortunate Eritreans are captured or purchased by human traffickers, who torture them and threaten them with amputations or sale of their organs if they do not manage to raise ransoms from their families to free them. Sometimes the kidnappers telephone family members to listen as their loved ones are tortured. The Eritrean families have to raise thousands of dollars to ransom them: how they get the money I do not know, given how poor Eritrea is. This is part of a larger story of Eritrean refugees, several hundred of whom drowned in 2013 while trying to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa just north of Tunisia.

Eritrean victims of the Lampedusa Drowning- Wiki Commons

I was interested in this report because I had read a little bit about Eritrea as background to a chapter I wrote on state slavery in North Korea (the chapter is forthcoming in 2014 in a book called Contemporary Slavery and Human Rights, edited by Annie Bunting and Joel Quirk; for my blog of slavery in North Korea, see http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2012/09/north-korean-slave-labour-in-this.html . )

By state slavery, I mean states—governments in power—who enslave their own citizens. One kind of state slavery is the communist kind, which in the 20^th century enslaved large numbers of people in prison camps now collectively known as the gulag, originally an acronym for slave-labor camps in the Soviet Union. Such enslavement was also widely used in China after 1949 and is still practiced, although apparently China’s rulers recently decided to abolish it. Slave labor was also practiced on an enormous scale during the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (1975-79).

The second kind of state slavery is enslavement of citizens for the financial or material benefit of the government and the individual slavers who control it, and that is the kind you find in Eritrea. Eritrea is a small state on the east coast of Africa that obtained its independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a long civil war. During the war, as I recall, there was a lot of propaganda about how the Eritrean nationalists were democrats who deserved to be freed from the tyrannical regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia.

Yet the Eritrean rulers soon introduced a system of state slavery for the benefit of the government and those who controlled it. They instituted an 18-month period of obligatory military service for every adult, male or female. By 1998 they had extended this so-called military service to be indefinite forced labor of anyone unfortunate enough to be drafted into the army. Officially, this forced labor lasts until the age of fifty, but sometimes individuals are enslaved even longer. Members of government and the ruling party, and senior military officers, use these slaves to build their houses, act as their personal servants, and work on farms, building sites, and enterprises owned by the state or army.

The Egyptian/Israel Border- Wiki Commons

Knowing what I did about Eritrea, I assumed the unfortunate victims of these traffickers in northern Africa were refugees who had fallen into the wrong hands.  But it turns out that sometimes they are kidnapped by their own Eritrean security officials, who sell them to Sudanese traffickers, including military officials and border guards, who then sell them on to traffickers in the Sinai. It isn’t enough for Eritrean officials to run a state of internal slavery, it seems; they also engage in the slave trade.

Another shocking aspect of this story is the way Eritreans are treated when they finally escape their captors. Some manage to reach the Israeli border, but the Israelis simply turn them back when they try to enter. Israel ratified the United Nations Convention on Refugees in 1954. One aspect of that convention is the provision of non-refoulement. Non-refoulement means you can’t return an individual to a country where she is likely to be tortured or politically persecuted. Yet the Israelis don’t offer to help these refugees: they simply return them to the very Egyptian soldiers who have often colluded in their capture in the first place. These soldiers often hold them to ransom again, before they can return to Eritrea.

Israel should be ashamed of itself, but apparently it has a hard time accepting that the black African people who live close to them have the same moral right to assistance as the Jews who were denied entrance to Canada, the United States, and other countries during Nazi rule in Europe.

If you are Eritrean, it seems, your choice—so-called--is between the devil you know and the devil you don’t know.  If you stay in Eritrea, you may well be a slave. If you leave, you risk drowning, kidnapping, torture and murder.  Meantime we are all horrified when hundreds drown within sight of Europe, but we manage to ignore what drove these hapless people out of their own country.

Reposting: What is the Global South?

Reposting: What is the Global South?

Today I am reposting a blog I first posted on August 15, 2012, when I was new to blogging and didn’t know how to publicize my work.  I still agree with what I said last year, except, apparently, the growth of the emerging economies is slowing down somewhat.  

What is the Global South?

The other day I was having lunch with an old friend who teaches the sociology of the family. She has noticed that lately her students have been using the term “global south” a lot, and she asked me what I thought of it. This gives me the chance to expound on one of my pet peeves. My students use the term “global South” to contrast the world’s rich with the world’s poor and to show their sympathies with the South.  But when I ask them where the global south is, they are stymied.

It’s not a geographical term. Some countries south of the equator are rich, such as Australia and New Zealand. Others are or are becoming middle-income countries, such as Chile. And in the North, there are many poor countries; one of the poorest, Haiti, is in both the North and the West. Another area that is very poor is the Arab Middle East, in the northern half of the world.

What can be considered the Global South- Wiki Commons

Nor is global south an economic term, meant to embrace all “underdeveloped” countries as “southern” regardless of their actual geographical location. Some formerly underdeveloped countries, both in the north and the south, are becoming much wealthier than they used to be when academic concern with underdevelopment first became widespread in the 1970s. About three million people live in a group of six growing economies, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and Mexico, some in the north and some in the south. China has been growing in leaps and bounds since it embraced authoritarian capitalism in 1979.  India has been growing since 1991, when it relinquished economic protectionism. China is now an exploiter of Africa, where it grabs up oil and minerals without a concern for internal development or democracy and human rights; it certainly doesn’t belong in the same “south” as the Africa it cheerfully pillages for resources.

Finally, the global south is not a good political term. China is now a major player on the world scene and in the United Nations Security Council, and many commentators think that this century will be the “Asian century” with China in the lead. The emerging economies also have more political clout, especially through the formation of regional political and economic blocs, such as the Organization of American States and the African Union.

When students use the term global south, they often mean to imply that the south is poor because the north is rich; that is, the north has been exploiting the south.  Yet we know that many causes of poverty are internal to the countries that experience it, not external. A few years ago the Arab Development Report, written by Arab scholars, mentioned the lack of democracy as one of the chief causes of underdevelopment in the Arab Middle East. In China there are still gross inequalities between rural and urban areas, and migrants to the cities are treated particularly badly: this is a result of domestic policy, not “northern” exploitation, past or present. In India, much poverty is a result not of relations with the north but of the caste system and severe gender discrimination. In Africa, a chief cause of underdevelopment is government corruption: witness Nigeria, whose hundreds of billions in oil revenues are ripped off by the governing elites and their cronies.

So what it comes down to, as far as I can see, is that the global south is Sub-Saharan Africa, a region that is in the geographical south, is very poor, and still has very little global political influence. It’s not a good idea, then, to use the term global south. The so-called south is divided by geography, economic prosperity, and political influence. The world is too complex to be divided into two categories, especially when such categories conflate the present with the past.

65 Years of International Human Rights: Progress, Gaps, Regressions

65 Years of International Human Rights: Progress, Gaps, Regression

This morning I was interviewed by a local radio reporter in advance of World Human Rights Day, which is tomorrow, December 10, 2013. This is the 65^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed in 1948.

The reporter wanted to know if anything has improved since 1948. A lot has. Probably the single biggest improvement is that over half the world’s population—women—are now recognized as subjects of human rights and have their rights guaranteed in most international human rights instruments. And women in many parts of the world enjoy many rights in practice as well--political rights to vote, economic rights to work and to equal pay, and so on. Lots more women are engaged in fighting for rights too.

Another improvement is that with the end of apartheid, overt racial discrimination is no longer allowed. Again, this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, in overt forms (such as discrimination against non-Jews in Israel) or covert forms (such as continued enslavement of “blacks” by “whites” in Mauritania). And the end of racial discrimination doesn’t mean the end of caste discrimination in India. 

DRC refugees fleeing conflict- Wiki Commons

Totalitarian governments, such as the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1971, and China from 1949 to 1979 (when it became an authoritarian capitalist state instead) have almost disappeared, although North Korea still hangs on to totalitarianism. Thirty years ago much of Latin and Central America was suffering under murderous military rule: most of those governments have gone.  Sub-Saharan Africa is making progress—though not as much as we would like—towards regimes that protect civil and political rights. And we’ve made a tiny dent in impunity for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes with the establishment of the International Criminal Court.

There are still gaps in the human rights regime. There is no declaration or covenant protecting the rights of LGTB individuals (lesbians, gays, trans-sexuals, bisexuals), although more and more protections are emerging through legal decisions. Little progress has been made in protecting aboriginal peoples’ rights as collectivities—most importantly to their traditional lands—as well as their rights as individuals. Some third generation “collective” rights such as to peace and a clean environment have a long way to go. It’s hard to believe the right to peace has any meaning when we know that over five million people have died from warfare, disease, starvation, and rape in the so-called “Democratic” Republic of the Congo since 1994. The world’s rulers still aren’t paying enough attention to the dangers of climate change, and it seems that corporations’ “rights” to make profits and countries’ “rights” to trade still take priority over the long-term life of the planet. 

There are regressions as well. Since 9/11 the world’s most established liberal democracies have imposed controls on civil rights of those suspected of being terrorists; most such suspects are Arabs and/or Muslims, and Islamophobia runs rampant in these societies. New technologies have increased the surveillance capacities of the state and of corporations, rendering us all vulnerable to the Big Brother controls envisaged by George Orwell in his 1984. The welfare state is under attack: governments are cutting back on all types of social security, cheered on by a corporate sector that pays its CEOs obscene amounts while vigorously fighting unionization and protesting against even the tiniest rise in the minimum wage. 

The reporter also asked me what I thought the worst human rights problems are in Canada. The worst by far is the treatment of First Nations people: not only because of their unresolved land claims, but because of gross violations of their individual rights. Indigenous peoples in Canada are disproportionately likely to be poor, to be incarcerated, and to commit suicide. The federal government that is supposed to finance education on reserves provides far less funding per pupil than the provincial governments where the reserves are located. Then there are the continuing multiple human rights violations of Canada’s poor, in housing, work, health, and education, just for a start. And we currently have a government with a terrible track record in environmental good management.

Finally, the reporter asked me what one person could do about human rights. Here I quote the Canadian political commentator Rick Mercer, whom I heard on a recent radio programme. He said everyone could use their own skill set, and mentioned his mother, a nurse, who use to spend her “vacations” donating free nursing at a summer camp for diabetic children. Lots of Canadians help other people to realize their human rights, from the volunteers at food banks to the doctors abroad in danger zones. Unfortunately though, to volunteer requires time, a regular schedule, and some money, even if it’s only enough to get to the place you want to volunteer at.  Poor people without money for bus fares, with irregular and arbitrary work schedules, and with multiple demands on their time, often can’t volunteer in a formal sense, even if they would like to, but many of them help each other with child care, personal care for the elderly and disabled, and so on.  If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to uphold human rights.

The Other Malala: Drone Victim Nabila Rehman

The Other Malala: Drone Victim Nabila Rehman

I teach a master’s level class on international human rights. The other day we were discussing the brilliant new (2013) book by Alison Brysk, Speaking Rights to Power, which analyzes how you can get particular human rights abuses on the international agenda. One way is to have an appealing symbol of a human rights cause, and in that connection the name of Malala Yousafzai came up. Malala is the 16-year-old Pakistani girl who was deliberately targeted and shot in the head by the Taliban a year ago (2012) because she was a vocal defender of girls’ right to education. Malala was brought to Britain for free medical treatment and now goes to school there. 

Everyone knows of Malala. She won the 2013 European Union Sakharov Prize (named after the famed Soviet-era dissident Andrei Sakharov), and was nominated for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize.  She’s a heroine of the international movements for girls’ rights and the right to education.  And so she should be. I have no patience with people who say she’s only a heroine because she fits in with the “Western” anti-Taliban narrative. Plenty of people in Pakistan detest the Taliban, as do people in Afghanistan. The Taliban use violence to subordinate women to men.

But as one of my students pointed out in class, there is a certain selectivity in lionizing Malala and not even noticing other Pakistani girls who suffer, especially girls who suffer because of US foreign policy. One policy that has a lot of human rights activists worried nowadays is the US use of drones to kill alleged terrorists in Pakistan and some Middle Eastern countries.

Nabila Rehman- Wiki Commons

On October 24, 2012, eight-year-old Nabila Rehman was in a field in North Waziristan, an area suspected to harbor many Taliban terrorists, with her grandmother Momina Bibi, a midwife. Ms. Bibi was teaching Nabila how to recognize when okra were ripe enough to pick. Suddenly a US drone appeared overhead, there was a dreadful noise and a flash of two lights, and Ms. Bibi was dead.  Nabila and her older brother Zubair were injured, Zubair quite seriously; their younger sister lost some of her hearing. And there was no free medical care for Nabila and her injured brother, as there had been for Malala. Like many other children in the region, Zubair no longer wants to go outside, even to play cricket. Many children in the region can’t sleep because of fear of drone attacks.

In October 2013 Nabila Rehman visited the US Congress with Zubair and her father, a teacher.  The visit was organized in part by a British non-governmental organization called Reprieve. Her lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, who represents many victims of US drone attacks and is a director of a Pakistani human rights group called Foundation for Fundamental Freedoms, was not allowed to accompany them. The visit was organized by a Democrat US Congressman, Alan Grayson, but only he and four other Democrats showed up to hear Nabila speak.

Speaking Rights to Power- Wiki Commons

I used to really admire Barack Obama: I went so far as to put an Obama bumper sticker on my car before the 2012 election, even though I’m Canadian and live in Canada (against my husband’s advice: he said I wouldn’t be able to get it off my car if I wanted to).  Perhaps I was caught up in the “thank-god-he’s-not-George W. Bush” euphoria that caused the Nobel Committee to give Obama an undeserved peace prize in 2009. But unless the US has a secret agreement with Pakistan to attack alleged terrorists with its drones (bring back Edward Snowden, so we can find out!) Obama is now permitting military violation of a sovereign state. He’s also engaging in extra-judicial executions, as Amnesty International has pointed out.

So why isn’t the world paying more attention to Nabila Rehman? According to Alison Brysk’s analysis, social movements need to have voices. Witnesses are one such voice, and Nabila is certainly a moving witness; even her translator was in tears when she visited Congress. Brysk also says human rights movements need to cultivate audiences, learn how to use mass media, and learn how to “perform” a human rights narrative. There’s lots of information about Nabila and her family on the Internet, but the audience seems to still be pretty small. The performance in the US Congress failed, because hardly anyone showed up.

Finally, Brysk says that human rights abuses get attention when they resonate with past acts that we know are wrong. Murder is wrong, but the US counters allegations of murder in Pakistan by claiming that drones are a much more efficient way of ridding the world of terrorists than, for example, a ground attack where many more civilians would be killed. You need a “frame” to make a human rights abuse stand out, but the frame of the US “war on terrorism” is much more powerful than the frame of “child victim of US policy.”

I think my student is right: even if there is every reason to admire Malala, other Pakistani girls, killed by the US rather than by the Taliban, deserve just as much sympathy and support. Nabila is one such girl.

Book Note: A Small Town Near Auschwitz

Book Note: A Small Town Near Auschwitz

Mary Fulbrook is the daughter of a German Christian woman “of Jewish descent” who fled to the United States shortly after the Nazis took power. One of her mother’s closest girlhood friends was Alexandra, who married Udo Klausa. Klausa was the Landrat, or administrator, of a small city in occupied Upper Silesia named Bedzin. After WWII, Mary’s mother and Alexandra resumed their friendship and Alexandra became Mary’s godmother. Thus, Mary was acquainted with Udo Klausa, who is the central figure of A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (published in 2012 by Oxford University Press).

A Small Town Near Auschwitz- Wiki Commons

From A Small Town we learn a fair amount about Udo Klausa’s job and his interactions with his superiors who were in charge of formulating regional anti-Jewish policies—including stripping Jews of their property and employment, banishing them from public spaces (except when a few Jews were executed and thousands others forced to watch), concentrating them into ghettoes, deporting them to labor camps and eventually to the conveniently close extermination camp of Auschwitz. We also learn how Udo Klausa interacted with his subordinates, including the local gendarmerie that helped the actual Nazi Storm Troopers. Klausa faithfully participated in the anti-Jewish policies, which he seemed to regard as ordinary administrative matters. He appeared completely oblivious to the roundups, executions, murders, and tortures that were frequent and highly visible actions against the town’s Jewish population.     

Fulbrook also shows us how “innocent” bystander Germans were collaborators. Alexandra Klausa held no official position: she was merely the wife of the Landrat, happy to have found reasonable accommodation for herself, her husband and their baby in the villa of a deported Jew. Alexandra’s letters show that she witnessed roundups of Jews, which occurred just across the street from where she lived. She wrote to her mother about some of the inconveniences of the roundups: she couldn’t get her shoes repaired any more, and the vegetable market had closed down.  She and Udo tried unsuccessfully to protect “their” Jew—their gardener and janitor—and his family. Granted, letters were censored and it would have been difficult for her to write her mother about the horrors she witnessed. Yet she seemed indifferent to them, as long as they did not affect her day-to-day life as a wife and mother. She did worry a lot about Udo’s “nerves” which in a charitable interpretation of his reactions to the persecution of the Jews might have indicated that he was uneasy about certain activities in which he was implicated. After the war, Klausa evaded punishment—eventually becoming a Landrat again in democratic West Germany—and wrote a memoir in which he claimed that he was not present in Bedzin for some of the worst “actions” against the Jews. But Fulbrook shows that he was.

Eichmann in Jerusalem- Wiki Commons

The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963 after she had witnessed the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel. Eichmann was one of the bureaucrats who organized the train system that took Jews to the extermination camps. Film footage of the trial shows him as a fairly ordinary, unprepossessing man, not a raving lunatic such as one might have imagined senior Nazi officials were (and as Hitler appears, to modern eyes, in footage of his speeches). To describe Eichmann’s role, Arendt coined the term, “banality of evil:” Eichmann was an evil, yet banal, person. Other works have also shown how “ordinary” were members of the Nazi killing machine. For example, Christopher R. Browning in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (HarperCollins, 1992) shows how ordinary German men, too old for the military, were converted into killers of Jews.

Ordinary Men- Wiki Commons

Mary Fulbrook shows us the others side of this ordinariness. She personalizes the Jews of Bedzin. She uses diaries and memories of survivors. She recounts the day to day fear of every Jew in Bedzin, not knowing when she or he might be picked up and deported. She relates in detail the malnourishment each Jew endures. She tells us exactly what it feels like to be a fearful hidden child. She details the murders of women and children. She refuses to let her readers distance themselves from Udo Klausa’s victims.

In some senses, we are all collaborators. Most of us go about our daily lives perhaps conscious of injustices and suffering, both at home and abroad, but unwilling to devote more than a few hours a week or a small percentage of our resources to trying to alleviate it. Fulbrook writes of Alexandra and Udo Klausa that they “acted in ways that were predicated on ‘not seeing’ how people were affected, ‘not knowing’ what the outcomes of their actions really were” (p. 8). But even if we do see and we do know, it is usually easier to put what we see and know aside. This is what the Klausas did, and what almost all of us do.  

North Korea; Still One of the World's Most Awful Places to Live (and Die)

North Korea: Still One of the World’s Most Awful Places to Live (and Die)

On September 27-28, 2013 I attended a conference in Toronto organized by the non-governmental group, The Council for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK Canada). This is a group of Korean-Canadians and others who have been trying to bring the plight of people living in North Korea—both ordinary North Koreans and political prisoners—to the attention of the wider Canadian public. So far they have managed to get several members of Parliament interested in this problem, and indeed, received a statement by Minister for Multiculturalism Jason Kenney during the conference proclaiming September 28 “North Korean Human Rights Day.”

North Korean prison in Pyongyang- Wiki Commons

For me, the most powerful part of this conference was listening (in translation) to the testimony of Ahn Myong-Chol, a former prison guard who escaped from North Korea and has been working with other defectors to expose the terrible conditions in the gulag there. He has written a book which is unfortunately not yet in English. He did not apply for the job of prison guard: he was assigned to it because his father was a member of the Korean Workers’ Party, so Ahn himself was “entitled” to a Party job.

When Ahn first arrived at the camp, he was encouraged to kill prisoners if he felt like it. He was ashamed to tell us that he took part in a custom of using prisoners as human punching bags when practicing martial arts; prisoners would be tied to a post and guards would kick and punch them.  Once he heard prisoners crying and screaming, and rushed over to find prison dogs attacking small children, three of whom died. Children are sent to prison camps in North Korea along with their parents, when their parents are accused of crimes: some children are even born there (see Blaine Harden’s 2012 book, Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, about Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person known to have been born in a prison camp and escaped).  Dogs are trained to recognize the distinctive smell of starving, maltreated prisoners, so that they can find anyone who tries to escape.

Ahn also witnessed several public executions, as one of his jobs was to drive the prisoners to the execution grounds. Prisoners were gagged so that they could not shout out any criticisms of the regime at the last moment. Family members were forced to witness the executions and were tortured or killed if they showed any emotion.

After eight years on the job Ahn was given his first vacation. When he arrived home, he discovered his family had disappeared. Asking around, he learned that his father had got drunk one night and blamed the North Korean leadership (probably Kim Jong-il, the second of the three Kims in the hereditary dynasty) for starving his people. The next day, knowing he would be arrested and imprisoned for criticizing Kim, he took his own life. But suicide in North Korea is a crime, so Ahn’s mother and two younger siblings were arrested and imprisoned: Ahn never saw them again.

The Tumen River at the Chinese-North Korean border- Wiki Commons

Some participants at the conference asked why someone--the UN, the West?—didn’t just invade North Korea and overturn the regime. There are all sort of geopolitical reasons why this won’t happen.  The route to changing North Korea’s horrible system is to put pressure on China. There are good reasons why China should no longer support North Korea: China’s prestige suffers when it supports such a brutal regime, and the North Koreans are a security threat to China, conducting nuclear tests close to the Chinese border. Also, so long as people continue to suffer from starvation and near-starvation in North Korea, they will flee to China. So it’s in China’s interests to stem that refugee flow by forcing North Korea to change the policies that permit it to starve its people to death.

Another way to change the North Korean political system is through information: it seems that the more North Koreans learn about the outside world, the better. A couple of years ago, through HRNK,  I listened to a defector who sent balloons from South to North Korea with DVDs in them: each balloon was also covered with writing explaining the real conditions of life in South Korea and the outside world. This defector had himself decided to leave North Korea when he read a pamphlet that had been dropped by activists; when I heard him, the North Koreans had already sent agents south to try to murder him.

Recently, activists have been able to put enough pressure on the United Nations and its member states that the UN Human Rights Council has now established a Commission of Inquiry into North Korea.  This is an important step in getting the UN as a whole to pay attention to the atrocities there. Departing from the usual practice of Commissions of Inquiry, this Commission is holding public hearings. Its report may pressure to UN to adopt further actions.  The best action would be to refer North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and some of his cronies to the International Criminal Court, where they could be tried for crimes against humanity including murder, slavery, and deprivation of food.  However, that would probably be blocked at the UN Security Council by China and Russia, although it appears China is getting increasing fed up with North Korea.

If you want to help North Koreans, I suggest (if you are Canadian) writing to your local Member of Parliament to show your support for measures to investigate North Korea’s appalling crimes and to indict its leaders for crimes against humanity. Also, whether you are Canadian or not, write to the Chinese Ambassador to your country, asking them to pressure North Korea to change and to stop supporting it with arms, money, or luxury goods for its leaders.  

And there’s one piece of good news in all this: international pressure does make a difference.  Ahn said that around 1992 he was told that he was no longer permitted to kill prisoners just because he felt like it. The reason was that Amnesty International had become interested in the prison camps, and the regime was afraid of an international inquiry. Ahn encouraged us all to keep up the pressure on this absolutely monstrous government.

For more on North Korea, see my blogs “Cannibalism in North Korea” March 20, 2013,  http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013/03/cannibalism-in-north-korea.html and “North Korean Slave Labour, September 11, 2012, http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2012/09/north-korean-slave-labour-in-this.html as well as my article *2012. “State-Induced Famine and Penal Starvation in North Korea,” Genocide Studies and Prevention, vol.7, no. 2/3, pp. 147-65.

Venezuela Update: Food Situation Worse under Maduro than Chavez

Venezuela Update: Food Situation Worse under Maduro than Chávez

On March 11, 2013, shortly after his death on March 5, I posted a blog about how Hugo Chávez had managed to create food shortages in Venezuela during his 14-year rule there. You can read that original blog at http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013/03/hugo-chavez-and-right-to-food-in.html. This is a short update on the food situation in Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro, who was Chávez’s designated successor and who was elected president in his own right on April 14, 2013.

 I’ve based this update on English-language newspaper reports I’ve been tracking since January 2013. It looks like things are getting a lot worse, not better, under Maduro. I realize it’s possible to argue that I’ve just been reading biased, anti-socialist press, but that argument doesn’t wash.  Neither Chávez nor Maduro understood/understands how markets work: they think that nationalizations and price controls will reduce food prices, but they don’t understand the costs to production and distribution of food of using those mechanisms.  

Nicolas Maduro- Wikipedia Commons

Maduro has been continuing—and exacerbating—all the policies I described in my March 11 blog, such as imposing price controls on more and more food and other items. The twelve-month inflation rate skyrocketed to 35 per cent per year by June 2013, partly as a result of continued devaluation of the bolivar, the Venezuelan currency, but also as a result of food scarcities. Food line-ups are becoming longer and longer as more and more food items become scarce, and Venezuelans have to spend more and more time going from shop to shop looking for goods. Many people who’ve been interviewed by the press complain about severe shortages of basics such as milk that they need to feed their children.

By June 2013 the price of basic commodities had risen by 44.6 per cent in one year: by August the figure was a rise of 60.8 per cent in one year. Rice, coffee, and beef, previously produced inside the country, now arrive from other countries. Maduro spends much of his time making deals with other Latin American countries to import food from them, but this food often rots as ships can’t unload at congested, inefficiently-run ports.

But this provides new opportunities for web entrepreneurs. Someone developed a mobile app to provide information about what goods are available where, so consumers can reduce the time they spend going from store to store looking for food. Some other people developed a website to provide information about the real (black-market), as opposed to the official exchange rate of the bolivar to the US dollar: Maduro responded by ordering their arrest.

When not blaming the shortages on an imperialist, CIA-led conspiracy, Maduro explains them away by focusing on “over-consumption” by Venezuelans, who have more purchasing power than in the years before the latest oil boom. He also blames shortages on a deliberate campaign of sabotage by food producers and distributors, ordering government agents to raid private companies’ warehouses for allegedly “hoarded” food. The private producers respond that much of the hoarded food is simply what is needed for production of finished products: for example, sugar for soft drinks. The largest food company in Venezuela, Empresas Polar, can’t import enough inputs for processed food such as the pre-cooked flour for arepas, Venezuela’s staple food because it can’t get government permission to buy dollars to finance its imports. Meantime, smugglers sell price-controlled food over the border in Colombia, thus exacerbating the food shortage.

Ironically, just as these food shortages have been worsening, in June 2013Maduro accepted an award from the FAO for Venezuela’s success in reducing malnutrition. While this success was real, as I discussed in my March 11 blog, it was due in large part to Venezuela’s high oil revenues and to general and unsustainable mismanagement of the economy. Other Latin American countries have achieved similar success to Venezuela’s in reducing malnutrition without huge oil revenues and without undermining the market economy.

If mothers in Venezuela cannot find milk for their children, then malnutrition might rise again in the not-so-distant future. Indeed, by early August 2013 forecasters were predicting a long-term decline in food consumption by 7.5 per cent by 2017. Maduro’s insistent continuation of Chávez’s economic policies does not bode well for Venezuelans’ future food security.

A New Quebec Value: Discrimination against Religious Minorities

A new Quebec Value: Discrimination against Minority Religious Groups

Yesterday (September 10, 2013) the government of Quebec (Canada) released its controversial “Charter of Quebec Values.” The political party in power in Quebec is a minority nationalist one, the Parti Québecois. According to numerous news reports (I can’t find the actual Charter on the Internet yet) this Charter is a statement of “values” that will ostensibly entrench religious neutrality in Quebec by prohibiting either providers or seekers of government services from wearing conspicuous religious symbols, such as hijabs (headscarves for female Muslims), turbans (for male Sikhs), and kippas (skullcaps for male Jews). As a sop to neutrality, Christians will also be prohibited from wearing large, conspicuous crosses. Small (discrete) crosses for Christians, and Stars of David (for Jews) will be allowed.  So if you live in Quebec and wear such symbols, get out your measuring tape!

Premier of Quebec Pauline Marois

One could of course ask, what business does government have proclaiming the “values” of its entire population? In democracies, citizens are supposed to have the right to whatever values they please. Sometimes they may not be permitted to act on those values, if they are against the law.  For example, some people may hate Sikhs, Jews, or Muslims, but they can’t refuse to hire them. But wait a minute, they will be able to do so in Quebec! If you are in the government in Quebec, even if you don’t hate Sikhs, Jews, or Muslims; even if in fact you rather like them, or are one yourself, you won’t be permitted to hire them for any kind of government job if they wear turbans, kippas, or hijabs.

Even more ridiculous, Sikh women and Muslim men will be okay, as most Sikh women don’t wear turbans and Muslim men don’t wear hijab (though some wear a small religious skull-cap, much like some Jewish men). Religious Jewish women may be okay as well: some married Jewish women wear wigs or hats, but hats appear not to be banned by the new Charter. So far beards aren’t banned either. Some Muslim and Jewish men wear long beards (so do some Amish and Mennonite men, but I don’t know if any of them live in Quebec) so if they are banned in the public service the problem will be, do you wear a beard because you are religious, or because you just don’t like to shave? If the latter, can you get a certificate to that effect?

These new rules even apply to government services such as day care. God forbid (sorry, the new value is secularism, so God shouldn’t really enter into this, unless he is Catholic: see below) that a child should have a kind, loving, carer who wears a hijab. Everywhere else in Canada, if you are a parent and your child asks why her carer or teacher wears a head-scarf, you could just say, because she is a Muslim. The child could then say, “Oh,” and ask for a cookie.  But now in Quebec when your kind, loving, day-care worker disappears because she’s been fired for wearing a hijab, you will have to say to your child, “because our government thinks it is wrong for her to care for you.” 

I’m all for separation of church and state, having been a victim of religious discrimination myself in Quebec a long time ago. When my parents brought me to Quebec from Europe as a young child, I was bilingual: we had been living in Belgium and I had learned to speak English in my home and French elsewhere. My father, a multilingual European, wanted to register me and my sister in French schools, but they wouldn’t accept us because we were not Catholic. My father would have had to pay fees for us, which he couldn’t afford, so we went to English schools.

This didn’t only happen to me. A friend from France had to attend English schools because he wasn’t Catholic: his mother was Jewish. A friend whose parents were from Italy and who learned French on the street was kicked out of French schools because he wasn’t Québecois (a person of French and Catholic ancestry) but the son of immigrants, and had to go to English Catholic schools instead.  (The education system in Quebec until fairly recently was confessional: there were French Catholic Schools, English Catholic schools, and Protestant schools; the latter attended by Protestant Protestants, Jewish Protestants, Muslim Protestants, etc). This went on until Bill 101, mandating that all immigrants must attend French schools, was passed in 1977, finally ending state-sanctioned religious discrimination in Quebec.

But the new Charter doesn’t advance separation of church and state: it discriminates against minority religious groups. The government of Quebec is claiming there’s a social problem where there is none. It seems to think wearing a religious symbol is the same as proselytization, trying to convert someone to your religion. It isn’t. Maybe what’s really going on in Quebec, as some commentators think, is that the Parti Quebécois is trying to play to the basest instincts of some sectors of the population, in order to get votes in the next election.

Meantime, probably so that the same people, of French and Catholic background, will vote for the Parti Québecois in the next election, the government has proclaimed that the Crucifix (a symbol of Roman Catholicism) hanging in the National Assembly, the provincial legislature, will remain. So, according to the September 11 Toronto Globe and Mail, will thousands of crucifixes that already exist in public buildings. Apparently this is part of Quebec “culture,” implying that the Muslims, Sikhs, and Jews who live in Quebec are not part of that culture. Perhaps they are just add-ons, superfluous groups who annoy “real” Québecois by insisting on reminding them that it’s okay to live in Quebec even if you aren’t French/Catholic (or at least, it used to be okay).

One thing’s for sure: there’s going to be a migration of professionals—especially doctors—from Quebec.  Doctors are a mobile group and there are a lot of places in Canada and the US where they can practice while wearing turbans, hijabs, or kippas. This is a shame for the people of Quebec, where there is already a severe shortage of doctors.  The five-year grace period that the Quebec government proposes for people to adapt to this new “secular” (but actually Catholic) Charter of Values will give all these people time to arrange for their migration.